Attracting Digital Native Students Through Digital Marketing

Abstract: As the world economies have shifted from being production-based to knowledge-based each country has to develop their technologically literate workforces to stay globally competitive. A low interest in the engineering profession among younger students has caused insufficient support for the workforce demand. Marketers must adapt their efforts to recruiting young people even before they attend college as this focused cohort tend to make career plans early. As today’s teenagers have been using digital media constantly since they grew up, they are frequently called digital natives. They perceive social networking sites, where they can communicate with friends and exchange information with people all over the world, as essential parts of their lives. This makes social networks great promotional tools, as digital natives share experiences and opinions about products and services online, creating a kind of electronic word-of-mouth, which is characterized as the future of social media marketing communications. To investigate in what ways digital natives’ absorb online marketing, the purpose of this research is to provide a better understanding of how technical high schools can address digital marketing activities to attract more students. The thesis was compiled after inquiries from the Swedish nationwide senior high school Teknikcollege, and it is conducted as a quantitative explanatory study, where primary data was collected through an online questionnaire distributed among junior high school students in Luleå and Överkalix. A total of 239 answers were collected and 182 answers were analyzed using statistical techniques. The results suggested that senior high schools should focus their online marketing efforts on visual social media channels, and that people based trust is the most important factor when using the peripheral route to persuade digital natives.